1. He Knew What He Wanted to Be When He Grew Up

Murphy’s high school yearbook photo featured the caption, “Future plans: Comedian,” and the young Murphy got down to business pretty quickly. He started working Long Island clubs like the Comic Strip, and his act proved to be so popular that within two years he was a full cast member on Saturday Night Live. It was a pretty quick start for someone who was such a lethargic student that he had to repeat the 10th grade.

Murphy was a natural for SNL, where his impersonations included Buckwheat, Bill Cosby, Muhammad Ali, and Jerry Lewis. Murphy wasn’t as at home off-screen, though, where he had trouble using his paychecks responsibly. As he later put it, “Give any 19-year-old kid $1,000 a week and he’ll freak out.” In 1982 Murphy told People that he had blown his previous year’s earnings on a Trans-Am and gifts for friends.

2. He May Not Have Written Coming to America

John Landis’ 1988 film Coming to America cracked up audiences and piled up a worldwide gross of over $288 million. Not only did Murphy star in the film, he also received the sole story credit. Writing and starring in such a smash hit would have been a major coup for even a big star like Murphy, but there was something fishy about the writing credit.

After the film became a huge success, humorist Art Buchwald sued Paramount for $5 million on the grounds that the movie was based on a treatment Buchwald had sold to Paramount in 1983. It turned out that Paramount had indeed optioned a very similar story in 1983 before terminating the project in 1985. Curiously, though, the Murphy-penned story for Coming to America came out three years later in 1988.

Buchwald and agent Alan Bernheim realized that Paramount was trying to bilk them out of some serious cash, and they sued the studio. After a seven-year legal battle, the pair received $825,000 from Paramount. Although Murphy was never personally implicated in the plotline pilfering, it’s pretty clear that his writing credit may not have been a true solo project.

3. He Had a Hit Record

Yes, Murphy did the obligatory celebrity record. His 1985 musical debut, How Could It Be, reached #26 on the Billboard 200. Although Aquil Fudge produced most of the album, it did have one Rick James-produced track in “Party All the Time.” The song was quite a hit; it even spent three weeks at the second spot on the Billboard Hot 100 behind topper Lionel Richie’s “Say You, Say Me.”

When MTV wanted Murphy to host the Video Music Awards that year, Murphy joked that he’d do it only if the channel would air his video. To Murphy’s surprise—he didn’t even have a video—MTV agreed. Murphy and James quickly threw together a video for the song, and James’ hair alone makes it a masterpiece:

4. His Suit from Delirious Met a Funny Fate

One of Murphy’s first major triumphs as a solo comedian was the 1983 stand-up special Delirious. Today the special is remembered for two things: its raunchy content and the form-fitting red leather suit that Murphy wore on stage for the taping. In fact, so many fans remembered the trademark suit that they would often ask Murphy what happened to the snappy duds.

In 2007, Murphy revealed the truth: Keenen Ivory Wayans had ruined the suit. According to Murphy, he once dared Wayans to wear the suit out for a night on the town and remain in character. Although the suit was tight on the much smaller Murphy, the 6’3” Wayans took his friend up on the dare. As Murphy later remembered, “He met girls, he had a sausage in his pants, there was dancing.” The suit, though, was seriously stretched out after Wayans’ adventures.

5. He’s a Clean Freak

As a child, Murphy was such a neat freak that his stepfather would joke that the lad needed to get a degree and a good job so other people would have to do his dirty work.

Fame didn’t change Murphy’s clean habits; if anything, it magnified them. Murphy has said he takes several showers a day and constantly washes his hands. As he explained it in an interview with Playboy, the process of meeting fans is just an inherently unsanitary one. “Because I always figure somebody might have dug in his nose…then he comes to shake my hand, ‘Hey, Eddie!’ Sometimes you pee and get a little pee on your hands and then it’s, “Hey, Ed!’”

‘5 Things You Didn’t Know About…’ appears every Friday. Read the previous installments here.

1. He Got to Say “Good Morning, Vietnam”

Sajak joined the U.S. Army in 1968 with the hope that he could avoid being sent to Vietnam. Of course, since it was 1968, that plan didn’t work out so well; Sajak ended up working as a finance clerk in Long Binh, Vietnam. Desperate to switch jobs, he kept applying for radio duty, but nothing happened.

Eventually, Sajak hit on an idea. He wrote a letter to one of his old radio employers who had been elected to Congress. A few calls to the right people later, and Sajak became an Army disc jockey, a job he held for 18 months. Sajak didn’t love a lot of the military’s radio rules, so he circumvented them. He later told the New York Times, “If you said your name, you were supposed to say your rank – specialist fifth class, which kind of ruins your patter. So on the radio I would just not say my name at all. I went for a year on radio without ever identifying myself.”

2. His Career Had a Rough Start

Sajak’s first steady radio gig was in Chicago on a tiny 250-watt Spanish language station. He worked a midnight-to-6-a.m. shift reading the news every hour as it came in off the wire. Although the station was Spanish, Sajak read the news in English, which probably limited his audience. On top of that, he didn’t speak Spanish, and the disc jockey he worked with didn’t speak English, which made the transition to the news a bit tricky. Sajak later told USA Today, “I’d hear him say my name, and I figured that was my cue. I made whatever was minimum wage at the time. I think $1.80 an hour.”

3. He “Looks Like Everyone’s Uncle”

Sajak may be synonymous with Wheel of Fortune now, but he hasn’t always been the show’s host. Chuck Woolery of Love Connection fame was the original host for the first six years of the show’s run, but in 1981 he parted ways with the show.

Wheel of Fortune was a hit, but now it needed a new host. Game show mogul Merv Griffin was watching the news in Los Angeles when he saw a promising young weatherman named Pat Sajak on KNBC-TV. Griffin hand-picked Sajak to take over Wheel, later explaining that he liked Sajak because he “looked live everyone’s uncle.”

4. Late Night Didn’t Go So Well

In early 1989, Sajak was looking for a new challenge, so he decided to try a jump to late night. CBS started airing Sajak’s nightly 90-minute talk show with an interesting philosophy: instead of trying to revolutionize late-night programming, Sajak and his producers thought the medium was already great and tried to build a broad appeal by maintaining the status quo. Check out this odd lineup of guests from the first episode of The Pat Sajak Show: Chevy Chase, Joan Van Ark, baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth, and music from the Judds.

The show may have been broad, but its appeal wasn’t. Sajak didn’t thrive in the late-night game, and the show got the ax after just over a year despite Sajak being signed to a two-year guaranteed contract.

Towards the end of the show’s run, CBS started using the show as an audition platform for replacement hosts, including a radio up-and-comer named Rush Limbaugh. This experiment didn’t go so well; Limbaugh immediately brought up abortion and locked horns with a female audience member. Have a look for yourself:

5. He Loves Baseball

Maybe it was only natural that Sajak would have Ueberroth on his first late-night show; the man is a baseball nut. (You may have spotted him sitting behind home plate during an Angels-Yankees ALCS game in Anaheim.) In fact, he loves baseball so much that in 2004 he pounced on the opportunity to become an investor in the upstart Golden Baseball League. The independent league, which now has 10 teams spread across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, has actually had some luck at getting players Major League Baseball jobs, including Seattle Mariners reliever Chris Jakubauskas.

Although many fledgling leagues quickly flop, the GBL is still going strong after five years. Sajak was even rewarded with his own bobblehead, which you can pick up for a measly five bucks.

‘5 Things You Didn’t Know About…’ appears every Friday. Read the previous installments here.

1. She Was a Spy

When World War II rocked her adopted France, Baker didn’t simply move to a more peaceful country. Instead, she stuck around and did her part for the war effort. Since she had initially publicly supported Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, the Axis powers mistakenly thought she was “one of them,” and Baker took full advantage of this misconception.

In fact, her fame made her the perfect spy. When Baker would travel Europe while touring, she obviously had to carry large quantities of sheet music with her. What customs officials never realized, though, was that a lot of this music actually had secret messages written on it in invisible ink. Fawning immigration officials never thought to take too close a look at the diva’s luggage, so she could sneak all sorts of things in and out of countries. On some occasions, Baker would smuggle secret photos of German military installations out of enemy territory by pinning them to her underwear.
This invaluable intelligence work eventually helped Baker rise to the rank of lieutenant in the Free French Air Force, and when the war was over she received both the Croix de Guerre (a first for an American woman) and the Medal of the Resistance in 1946.

2. She Was Worth Dueling Over

Lots of stars have devoted fans, but how many would be willing to fight a duel for their favorite diva? In 1928, a Hungarian cavalry officer and an Italian count did just that in Budapest. According a contemporary account from Time, “the ogling and attentions of Hungarian Cavalry Captain Andrew Czlovoydi became too fervently gallant to be stomached by La Baker’s manager, Count Pepito di Albertini.” Rather than just ask Czlovoydi to knock it off, the Count took the reasonable step of challenging the soldier to a swordfight duel.

Fittingly, the two duelers met in a cemetery for their showdown while Baker cheered on the Count from a perch atop a tombstone. According to Time, the two men battled with swords for a solid ten minutes before the Count took a light blow to the shoulder. At that point, Baker intervened and forced the two men to set aside their differences.

3. Angelina Jolie Had Nothing on Her

Celebrities adopting children from underprivileged backgrounds may be old news at this point, but what Baker did in the 1950s is still shocking and fascinating. In an effort to combat racism and provide an example for the rest of the world to follow, in 1954 Baker started adopting orphans from all corners of the world.

Baker started by adopting a Korean child, Akio, then followed up with Japanese Taruya, Finnish Jari, and others until she had assembled a family of 12 children from a variety of countries and ethnicities. Baker dubbed these kids “the Rainbow Tribe,” and housed them in her chateau in southwestern France.

As part of her efforts, Baker also turned the chateau into a sort of resort/theme park with a multicultural theme. It didn’t catch on quite as well as Epcot did. By 1968, the operation was hemorrhaging money, and Baker’s creditors had to sell the mansion out from under her.

4. She Was Tight With Grace Kelly

Although Baker lived and worked in France, she still made frequent touring trips back to the United States. During one 1951 visit to New York, Baker found herself at the Stork Club at the same time as rising actress Grace Kelly. When the racist staff refused to wait on Baker, Kelly, who was dining with a large party of her own, flew into a rage and walked out of the club in support of Baker.

From that moment on, Kelly and Baker were close friends. In fact, when the Rainbow Tribe’s chateau was on the rocks financially, Kelly—who by that time had become Princess Grace—tried to bail Baker out with her creditors. When Baker ended up losing the house, Kelly didn’t abandon her hard-luck friend. Instead, she arranged for the singer to have a villa in Monaco.

5. She Had Quite the Menagerie

Baker was just as big on collecting animals as she was about acquiring children. When a club owner gave her a pet cheetah named Chiquita to use as part of her dance show, Baker was delighted. In fact, she liked Chiquita so much that the cat stayed with her long after the act ended; eventually the cheetah traveled the world with Baker, always riding in her car and sleeping in her bed.

That wasn’t Baker’s only pet, though. She had a goat named Toutoute who lived in her dressing room at her nightclub, and at the same club she had a pet pig named Albert. Albert was no ordinary pig. Not only did he live in the club’s kitchen and munch on food scraps, but Baker also liked to gussy him up with fancy perfumes. At one point Albert got so hefty from living this high life that he couldn’t make it out of the kitchen’s door any longer, so the door’s frame had to be broken down.

‘5 Things You Didn’t Know About…’ appears every Friday. Read the previous installments here.

1. He Was a Bakery Pro

While Trumbo was trying to make it as a writer in Los Angeles, he got a job as a night wrapper at a bread bakery to help him make enough cash until he started selling his work. As it turned out, he held this bakery job for nearly a decade; from 1925 to 1934 he diligently wrapped bread at night and wrote during the day.

The only problem was that nobody seemed to like his writing much. Trumbo penned six novels and close to 90 short stories during his bakery years, and publishers rejected each one. His life wasn’t boring, though. Trumbo also dabbled in some side rackets, including repossessing motorcycles, to supplement his bakery earnings. Another thing Trumbo tried was bootlegging, although he quickly got out of that business after rivals killed a pair of his competitors.

The brief stint running liquor actually ended up launching Trumbo’s career, though. In 1932 he sold a piece about the bootlegging business to Vanity Fair, and the magazine liked the story so much it made Trumbo its new Hollywood correspondent, which finally enabled him to leave the bakery.

2. He Didn’t Name Names

As an artistic, working-class pacifist, Trumbo was an ideal recruit for the 1940s-era Communist Party, and he did in fact join up in 1943. Unfortunately, this affiliation wasn’t the wisest show business career move at the time. In 1947, Trumbo and nine other writers and directors had to go before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about the insidious threat of Communism in Hollywood.

When Trumbo and his fellow witnesses refused to testify or name names of other Hollywood communists, they were convicted of contempt of Congress and placed on the Hollywood blacklists. Not only did it seem like Trumbo’s career as a screenwriter was probably over, but he also had to spend 11 months in a federal prison in Kentucky.

3. But He Didn’t Stop Writing

Even though Trumbo went to jail and found his way onto the Hollywood blacklist, he didn’t stop writing. On the contrary, he surreptitiously did some of his best work during the blacklist years. After getting out of jail, Trumbo decamped to Mexico and started cranking out scripts under a variety of pseudonyms, including Sally Stubblefield.

While on the blacklist Trumbo wrote films as varied as the John Dall noir classic Gun Crazy and Roman Holiday. On some movies Trumbo used a pseudonym, while on others he had another scriptwriter serve as a “front.”

English writer Ian McLellan Hunter fronted for Trumbo on Roman Holiday and actually ended up winning an Oscar for his trouble.

Trumbo also wrote the 1956 film The Brave One under the pseudonym Robert Rich; this work also won an Oscar for its writing. Since Trumbo couldn’t very well turn up to accept his statue, half a dozen impostor Robert Riches showed up to pick up “their” honor the next day.

Eventually the Academy rectified these injustices. In 1975, it presented Trumbo with his Oscar for The Brave One, and in 1993 his wife Cleo accepted a posthumous Oscar for the Roman Holiday script.

4. He Put Metallica on the Charts

In 1939, Trumbo published the anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun, a nightmarish look at the life of a World War I veteran who has lost his limbs, face, and voice after being hit by an artillery shell. The novel slips back and forth between fantasy and the protagonist’s hellish reality, and although it’s very well written, it’s incredibly difficult to read due to the bleak, gruesome content. Nevertheless, the book was a big success in the years leading up to World War II, even winning the forerunner to the National Book Award.

What does that have to do with Metallica, though? Someone on the band’s management team recommended the novel to singer James Hetfield during the band’s early days, and Hetfield thought it was so amazing that he wrote a song about it for the album …And Justice For All. The song, “One,” ended up being the fourth single released from the album in 1989, and it became Metallica’s first song to crack the Top 40. What’s more, the song earned Metallica its first Grammy, a 1990 win for Best Metal Performance. One music video for the song even features spliced footage from the film adaptation of the novel, which Trumbo directed himself.

5. He Had Some Interesting Work Habits

Writers often like to work in seemingly bizarre settings, but it must have been pretty amazing to walk in on Trumbo furiously working on a script. For starters, Trumbo liked to bang out his screenplays from the bathtub at night. Working from the tub isn’t so strange, but Trumbo often had company when he wrote: a parrot that Spartacus star Kirk Douglas had given the writer as a gift.

Douglas later wrote of Trumbo in his autobiography The Ragman’s Son, “He worked at night, often in the bathtub, the typewriter in front of him on a tray, a cigarette in his mouth (he smoked six packs a day). On his shoulder perched a parrot I had given him, pecking Dalton’s ear while Dalton pecked at the keys.”

Steve Martin dated Trumbo’s daughter Mitzi and later recalled how Trumbo smoked pot to curb his drinking and exercised by walking laps around his swimming pool while smoking a cigarette. [Image credit: Mitzi Trumbo/Samuel Goldwyn Films.]

‘5 Things You Didn’t Know About…’ appears every Friday. Read the previous installments here.

1. She Almost Didn’t Become Jackie Kennedy

Jacqueline Bouvier came to international prominence when JFK became president, but she very nearly had a different husband. In December 1951 she was engaged to another man, John G.W. Husted. Husted was a Yale grad, a stockbroker, and a member of the same upper class of New York society as the Bouvier family.

The engagement didn’t last long, though. By March of 1952, Jackie had called it off. It’s not exactly clear why she gave Husted the ax, but there’s been lots of speculation. Some biographers think that Jackie’s mother, Janet, felt that Husted didn’t make enough money to support her in style. (His salary of $17,000 a year was roughly equivalent to $100,000 today.) Other biographers have recounted stories of Jackie confiding to friends that Husted was immature and a little on the dull side.

Whatever the reason, the relationship ended, and Jackie Bouvier was soon dating John Kennedy; the couple would marry in September 1953.

2. She Accidentally Appeared in Hustler

If you ever wonder how today’s celebrities haven’t yet realized that topless sunbathing is never a good idea if you’re a target of the paparazzi, you should at least know that the exposed starlets are in good company. In 1972 Jackie O. was photographed while sunning herself in the nude on husband Aristotle Onassis’ private Greek island, Skorpios, by a photographer using a telescopic lens on a fishing boat.

The pictures first appeared as black-and-white prints in European men’s magazines like the Italian rag Playmen, but they didn’t make it to the States until Larry Flynt purchased them for his Hustler magazine in 1975. Flynt ran five full-color shots in the August issue, and despite Flynt’s decision to print several million more copies than normal, the issue quickly sold out. He later called buying the pictures “the best investment I ever made.”

3. She Locked Horns With the Paparazzi

The flap over these nude pictures wasn’t the only time the paparazzi ran afoul of Jackie O. In 1967 a particularly devoted paparazzo named Ron Galella followed Jackie home to her Manhattan apartment building and spent the next five years more or less following her every move, often from a perch on the bench in front of her building. He even went so far as to date one of her maids.

Jackie seemed to have taken this annoyance in stride for quite a while, but when Galella jumped in front of JFK Jr.’s bike in 1972, she had seen enough. Jackie O. took Galella to court and received a restraining order to stop Galella from harassing her. Although Galella had orders to stay 25 feet away from the former first lady, he openly scoffed at this rule, and 10 years later Jackie O. had to sue him again. This time Galella finally gave up after facing a $125,000 fine and the potential of spending seven years in prison.

Jackie O. wasn’t the only person Galella drove to distraction, either. In 1973 he so enraged Marlon Brando that the star slugged him in the jaw, knocking out five of Gallela’s teeth. Brando’s fellow actor Richard Burton loathed Galella so intensely that he hired goons to beat the photographer up.

4. She Won an Emmy

When the future First Lady toured the White House with her mother and sister in 1941, she noticed something odd: for a house with such a rich history, all of the furnishings and fixtures seemed awfully modern. Upon moving into the White House 20 years later, she set about to rectify this problem by filling the house with antiques that would accentuate the house’s history. As she told LIFE Magazine, “All these people come to see the White House and they see practically nothing that dates back before 1948…Everything in the White House must have a reason for being there. It would be sacrilege merely to ‘redecorate’ it — a word I hate. It must be restored — and that has nothing to do with decoration. That is a question of scholarship.”

After throwing herself into the restoration process for over a year, Jackie Kennedy was ready to unveil her restored White House to the public in 1962. On Valentine’s Day of that year the major networks broadcast A Tour of the White House, in which Kennedy and CBS newscaster Charles Collingwood surveyed her handiwork. An incredible 56 million viewers watched the program, and the First Lady received a special Emmy, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Trustees Award. Lady Bird Johnson accepted the award for the First Lady, and the statuette is still on display at the Kennedy Library.

If you want to check out the special, it’s on Hulu:

5. She Was Tight With Andy Warhol

Warhol’s images of the grief-stricken First Lady around the time of her husband’s assassination are among the most memorable of his long career, and he actually became quite chummy with their subject. The former First Lady eventually became a frequent guest at Warhol’s spread in Montauk, New York, and when the artist died, he left behind a couple of pieces of odd memorabilia.

Warhol was a notorious packrat, and archivists who were trying to sort through his belongings earlier this year made a pair of interesting Kennedy finds. One was a piece of cake from the wedding of Caroline Kennedy to Edwin Schlossberg in 1986; Warhol had apparently put the cake in a box and forgotten about it. The other find was a bit more titillating: a nude photo of Jackie O. Even more interesting, it was apparently autographed by the lady herself; it bore the inscription “For Andy, with enduring affection, Jackie Montauk.” Sounds like the former First Lady knew how to have a little fun with her image.
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One bonus fact we’ve mentioned before: Jackie O. was the editor of Michael Jackson’s autobiography, Moonwalk.

‘5 Things You Didn’t Know About…’ appears every Friday. Read the previous installments here.

1. He Got His Start in the Jeans Business

Buying an 80% stake in the Nets for an alleged $200 million would put a crunch in most peoples’ budgets, but earlier this year Forbes reported that Prokhorov’s cash holdings alone might be worth upwards of $5 billion. Unlike many fabulously wealthy men, though, he didn’t get any financial help from his family. In fact, he got his start in the jeans business.

Although Prokhorov’s parents weren’t particularly rich, they were sharp. His mother was the head of a polymer research department at the Moscow Chemicals Institute, and his father also ran a lab. Their son excelled in his studies and attended Moscow State Institute of Finance. After he graduated from college, he got a job at the International Bank for Economic Cooperation in 1989. Prokhorov put his money in an investment vehicle that would only have thrived in the late 80’s: an acid-washed jeans company. With the profits from his denim venture, Prokhorov continued to rise up the financial ladder.

2. He Knows His Metals

Although Prokhorov first grew to prominence in the financial sector, he made his serious loot in the mining industry. In 1993 he purchased Norilsk Nickel during the wave of post-Communism privatization and built the Siberian mining company into a natural resources titan. One of his major coups involved investing in specialized Finnish freighters that could move metals around the Arctic without needing icebreakers.

Just how big did Norilsk Nickel get under Prokhorov? In 2005 he spun off all of the company’s gold mining assets into a separate company, Polyus Gold. Polyus Gold alone is now worth around $8 billion, and Prokhorov is still chairman of the company’s board. He resigned as CEO of Norilsk Nickel in early 2007 and sold his shares in the company for $7.5 billion.

3. He Knows How to Throw a Party

Prokhorov ran afoul of French authorities in 2007 when he hosted a two-week Christmas party for his fellow Russian plutocrats at his chalet in the ski resort Courchevel. This wasn’t the normal sort of “Turn down your loud music!” complaint for the cops, though. Police arrested Prokhorov on suspicion of flying prostitutes in from Moscow to service his guests.

A raid on the hotel where many guests were staying resulted in 26 arrests, including Prokhorov and seven beautiful 20-something Russian women. Prokhorov contended that his companions were just friends he had met at Moscow nightclubs. According to Prokhorov, he flew them in for the party and covered all of their expenses, but he didn’t expect anything in return other than their company. The billionaire told the police he liked the company of intelligent women and that “to stay young, you have to be surrounded with youth and beauty.” When the cops ascertained that none of the women were actually professional call girls or prostitutes, they released everyone without filing charges.

Perhaps the best quote on the whole debacle came from Nicolas Sarkozy, who was a presidential candidate at the time. When told of the charges, Sarkozy quipped, “There’s a man who wants to please.”

4. He Likes to Win a Bet

A good-looking 44-year-old with a net worth estimated at $9 billion? How could this guy not be Russia’s most eligible bachelor? The Russian press hangs on each of Prokhorov’s adventures with the young ladies, and he’s apparently had quite a few, including reportedly dating supermodel Naomi Campbell.

A truly bizarre story about Prokhorov’s love life broke in the spring of 2007. The oligarch was supposedly planning a $10-million wedding on Maldives in which he would marry an unknown woman. This wasn’t going to be a storybook wedding, though; Prokhorov was allegedly marrying the woman only to divorce her one week later. Why would he act so erratically? To win a childhood bet. According to the Russian press, Prokhorov had made a bet with a childhood friend—both the stakes of the wager and the friend were unknown—that he would be married before his 42nd birthday. Russian reality TV host and socialite Ksenia Sobchak (pictured), also known as “Russia’s Paris Hilton,” even claimed that she would be the mysterious bride.

Despite all the fuss in the European press, Prokhorov’s birthday passed without a wedding, and the real secret behind Prokhorov’s love life remains a mystery.

5. He’s a Sports Nut

Prokhorov may see the Nets as a good investment, but he’s also the sort of sports fanatic who might be Russia’s equivalent of Mark Cuban. Prokhorov is extremely tall—estimates range from 6′6″ to 6′9″—and played basketball in his youth. He already owns a piece of CSKA Moscow, one of the top hoops teams in Europe.

He’s not just a basketball fan, though. Earlier this summer there were rumors that Prokhorov might try to buy the Italian soccer team AS Roma, and although the team has denied any sale, there are still whispers that Prokhorov may end up in the soccer business as well. Forbes also notes that the oligarch “loves kickboxing.”

‘5 Things You Didn’t Know About…’ usually appears on Friday, but we moved it up this week. Read the previous installments here.

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1. He Grew Up With Rock

Slash was born Saul Hudson in Stoke-on-Trent, England, in 1965. The Hudson family lived there until Saul was 11, when they moved to Los Angeles. Slash had a pretty good foot in the door of the rock world from the time he was born. His mother, Ola Hudson, designed costumes for John Lennon, the Pointer Sisters, and Diana Ross, and his father, Anthony Hudson, designed album covers for Neil Young and David Bowie, among others. The family also lived near David Geffen and Joni Mitchell. Not a bad way to get into rock music.

Slash’s parents broke up in the mid-70s, and his mom started dating Bowie. In 1990 Slash talked to Rolling Stone about his childhood feelings for Bowie: “I really didn’t like him that much, because he was the new guy in the house. I was really resentful.”

2. Even the Nickname “Slash” Has a Famous Origin

Film buffs know the veteran character actor Seymour Cassel as a frequent player in movies directed by John Cassavetes and Wes Anderson. (Cassel played Max Fischer’s dad in Rushmore and Royal Tenenbaum’s fellow elevator operator in The Royal Tenenbaums.) When Slash was growing up in Los Angeles, though, Cassel was just his buddy Matt’s dad.

Even as a teenager, Saul Hudson had a lot of frenetic energy, and one day he was zipping from one room to another at a party at the Cassels’ house. The actor gently ribbed Hudson’s constant motion by asking, ““Hey, Slash, where ya going? Where ya going, Slash? Huh?” The nickname stuck.

3. He Shoplifted His Top Hat

In 2007 Slash told the Huffington Post that he acquired his signature top hat in 1985 when he went shopping for a memorable accessory to wear for a show in Los Angeles. Since the aspiring guitar god was broke at the time, the line between “shopping” and “shoplifting” was pretty blurred.

According to Slash, he spotted the top hat in a store called Retail Slut and fell in love. Since a top hat can’t exactly be hidden under your shirt, Slash simply grabbed the hat and walked out, apparently unseen. When he got home he realized the hat looked a little plain, so he wrapped it with a belt he’d swiped on the same outing. And just like that, his trademark look was born.

Ironically, when Slash’s hat was stolen during a round of Grammys after-parties a few years ago, he had to rely on the police to regain the purloined lid. Here’s a video of the man himself telling the story:

4. He Also Swiped One of His Guitars

When Slash showed up for a 2007 ceremony honoring his career at Las Vegas’ Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, he had a surprising gift for his hosts. Slash returned a guitar that he’d swiped years earlier from the dressing room of the Hard Rock in Orlando. As he told the story, “It was in the dressing room. I didn’t know what it was doing there, so I took it. I mean, it was in the dressing room and no one claimed it. So I’ve had it all these years and been playing it.”

What made Slash return the guitar that he’d pinched in an apparently perfect crime? He told reporters, “I thought what better way to honor the Hard Rock for honoring me than to give it back, sort of.” At least he eventually did the right thing.

That’s not the only high-profile guitar Slash has given away, though. In 1981 Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry sold his sunburst-finish 1958 Gibson Les Paul to scrounge up some money for Christmas. Ten years later, Perry got nostalgic and started looking for the guitar. He quickly found it; Slash was playing it in a Guitar Player centerfold.

Perry was one of Slash’s boyhood idols, but when he called to see if Slash would sell him the guitar, Slash wouldn’t budge. Perry understood and later said in an interview, “I mean if I had a chance to get hold of the white Strat Jeff Beck played on Wired, I’d have a hard time letting go of it!” In September 2000, though, Perry was playing with Cheap Trick at his own 50th birthday party when a guitar tech walked onto stage and handed him his long-lost guitar as a birthday gift from Slash.

5. He’s a Friend to Elephants

You might not know it, but Slash is a huge supporter of animals and the environment. Earlier this year he got behind the cause of Billy, an endangered Asian elephant who lives at the LA Zoo. When Slash learned that funding for the zoo’s Pachyderm Forest was in jeopardy, he filmed a broadcast-and-YouTube plea urging the Los Angeles City Council to complete the new habitat.

At the time, one of the zookeepers told Reuters, “I’ve always been impressed with Slash’s knowledge of animals. In many cases, he is even able to identify the different subspecies, something that most people can’t do.” Not too surprising for a guitar god who once owned 80 snakes.

‘5 Things You Didn’t Know About…’ appears every Friday. Read the previous installments here.

1. He Really Was Greek

Nick the Greek was born Nicholas Andreas Dandolos in Crete at some point around the turn of the 20th century. (Dandolos was cagey about revealing his age. While some friends insisted he was born in 1883, he claimed to be just 60 when he died in 1966.) Although he was born into a wealthy family, Dandolos was a diligent student and earned a degree in philosophy at the Greek Evangelical College – a degree that would later earn him the nickname “The Aristotle of the Don’t Pass Line.” He didn’t stay in Greece and become the next great Greek philosopher, though. Dandolos’ family sent him to the United States with an allowance of $150 a month.

Dandolos, of course, used the allowance to bankroll his early gambling adventures. After a short stay in Chicago he moved to Montreal and began betting on horse races. As it turned out, Nick the Greek had a knack for picking the ponies; he allegedly turned his allowance into $500,000 in just one racing season.

2. He Was Equally Good at Winning and Losing Money

According to Dandolos, he took the half-million he’d won playing the horses and returned to Chicago. In the Windy City he learned how to shoot craps and play cards, two pursuits that led to him promptly dropping the entire gigantic bankroll during a run of bad luck.

This loss sort of set the stage for the rest of Nick the Greek’s life. He never really seemed all that interested in money; what he really wanted from gambling was the action. Although he estimated he won and lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million total in his life, he also added that he went from rags to riches and back around 73 times over the course of his career.

How could someone build such huge fortunes and then just fritter them away? One of Nick the Greek’s most famous quotes offers a quick explanation: “The next best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing.”

3. He Could Run a (Poker) Marathon

In 1949, Nick the Greek called up famed casino owner Benny Binion to ask for Binion’s help in finding a heads-up poker game against one of the world’s best high-stakes players. Binion agreed to help set up the game against Johnny Moss, but on one condition: the entire one-on-one match be played in the lobby of Binion’s casino, where the public could watch.

Binion ended up getting more publicity for his casino than he’d bargained for. Dandolos and Moss played each other constantly for five whole months. The only breaks in the action came when the two players had to sleep, and they hopped from one poker format to another. After five months, Moss finally nailed Dandolos on a particularly large five-card stud hand. The exhausted Nick the Greek stood up from the table and famously said, “Mr. Moss, I have to let you go,” shook Moss’ hand, and retired from the game.
Some observers estimated that Moss had taken $2 million off of Dandolos, while Moss later claimed he’d pegged the Greek for $4 million.

The real winners were poker fans, though, as the wild popularity of this marathon session among spectators later inspired Binion to start the World Series of Poker.

4. He Didn’t Help the Early Movie Business

While Nick the Greek loved poker and betting the don’t-pass line at craps, his favorite pursuit was supposedly faro, a largely obsolete card game that was popular in the Old West. Dandolos could go on long faro binges that nearly equaled his poker marathon. At one point Nick the Greek arranged for movie producer and Universal Studios founder Carl Laemmle to stake him for a three-month faro bender in Reno. The cards weren’t falling for Nick the Greek, and Laemmle ended up losing every dime he put up to back Dandolos.

5. He May Have Shown Einstein the Town

Dandolos was a popular, garrulous fellow, so when big names came to visit Vegas, friends would occasionally arrange for Nick the Greek to show the tourists around. One possibly apocryphal story tells of how Dandolos gave Albert Einstein the grand tour of Vegas during Einstein’s tenure at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

As the story goes, Dandolos didn’t want to have his gambling cronies mock Einstein for being a scientist, so he introduced the physicist as “Little Al from Princeton” and explained to his friends that Little Al “controlled a lot of the action around Jersey.”

Although it’s impossible to know if that story actually happened, Nick the Greek definitely interacted with at least one brilliant scientist. Nobel-Prize-winning physicist and Manhattan Project researcher Richard Feynman wrote in his autobiography about how Dandolos taught him his betting system of winning by avoiding the obvious bets at table games.

‘5 Things You Didn’t Know About…’ appears every Friday. Read the previous installments here.